<p class="annotatable">A study has shown that the percentage of
dialogue that female character's get in Disney films is on a
downward slope... yes, DOWNward.
<p class="annotatable">The research - taken on by linguists Carmen
Fought and Karen Eisenhauer, which analyses every line of dialouge
in Disney animated princess movies from 1937 to 2013 -has
found that there's been a decrease in female dialogue since the
earlier films.
<p class="annotatable">To put it into
perpective: Cinderella, *Sleeping
Beauty*, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
spoke 50-70% of the dialogue in their films, while subsequent
movies are lucky if they get a third of the talking time.
<p class="annotatable">Which is odd, considering we're talking
about the TITLE characters, here.
<p class="annotatable">Ariel in The Little Mermaid
gets 32% of the lines and Mulan (in - hey, you guessed it -
Mulan) gets 23%. We hate to bring Frozen into
this, but even the 2013 blockbuster had a shamefully low amount of
female dialogue at just 41% with the male characters speaking the
majority.
<p class="annotatable">Eisenhaur tried to explain the difference to
The Washington Post, explaining: "my best guess is that
it's carelessness, because we're so trained to think that male is
the norm. So when you want to add a shopkeeper, that shopkeeper is
a man. Or you add a guard, that guard is a man. I think that's just
really ingrained in our culture."
Try harder, Disney. Try harder.
